Sexism exist. Also, the UK is still in many ways a class-society; not because there are laws regulating class but because many people want it to be like that. UK wouldn't be as much "fun" if it wasn't so. People take a sort of pride in it, and keep to their class.
It's hard to explain how that can play, and it is really hard for foreigners to pick up on, while a brit would spot it at once. You could make shows that were totally unintelligible for the rest of the world where the plot hinged on this. Any brit would pick up on it at once, no one else would.
There are cues all the time, not least language clues that identify you belonging to a certain class at once. If you give off the wrong cues in a given situation, you can exclude yourself pretty quickly.
My favorite example of this is a gay movie, "Beautiful thing", where the main MC's mother gets involved with a middle class guy named Tony. A lot of the chuckles in the movie is about how Tony just misses all the cues, or tries to impose his middle class cues on people around him. He keeps going on about how the word 'bird disempowers women' for instance.
But this is a derail... I'll bow out now. It was the sexism that got me thinking about this.
But it can tie into the Beeb-fight. Lynda la Platt can also be arguing out of this position, the class position. I'm not sensitive enough to pick up on it, but any brit should be able to do so.
I'll comment on this derail.
You're absolutely right about the whole class thing.
My husband worked in horse racing when we lived in England, and it is something that is really evident there. He was a Head Lad, which meant that he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the yard. He told me of an owner who came to see his horse. My husband stood in the stable, holding the horse and the owner looked at him and said. "Could you turn the horse around, 'Boy'." Husband told the owner, in no uncertain terms, that he was the sodding Head Lad, not a 'Boy'.
There's a lot of snobbery about new money vs old money. People with 'old money' definitely look down on 'new money' people who are seen as 'vulgar'. Some things haven't changed since the 19th century.
Oddly enough, the people in racing that I knew, who were 'new money' were ruder to the stable staff. Old money people tended to treat the staff with a bit more respect.
As for Lynda La Plante. I would hazard a guess that she's more a victim of overexposure. One thing I have noticed about British media is that there's a 'flavor of the month' personality who gets crammed down people's throats,
ad nauseum until someone else comes along to knock them off the throne. I remember having to put up with Carla Lane's stuff for ages, because, for a while, the BBC thought she could do no wrong. It did my nut. I never thought her writing was as good as the BBC and media reviewers thought it was. Then, people got bored with her and the media decided to brand her as a bit of a loony because she collects animals and her big old mansion is over-run with waifs and strays.
